St. Patrick has himself briefly described some of the features of his work, and his description bears out and supplements the general impression which we derive from the details recorded by tradition. In the first place, he indicates the double character of his work. On the one hand he created an ecclesiastical organisation, he chose and ordained clergy, for a people which had been recently turning to the Christian faith.[170] On the other hand, he planted that faith in regions which were wholly heathen, in the extreme parts of the island, as he repeatedly insists.[171] He spread his nets that a large multitude “might be caught for God,” and that there might be clergy everywhere to baptize and exhort a folk needing and craving their service.[172] He says that he baptized thousands, and this need not be a figure of hyperbole,[173] and ordained ministers of religion everywhere. The foundation of monastic communities is borne out by his incidental observation that young natives have become monks, and daughters of chieftains “virgins of Christ.”[174] These maidens, he says, generally took their vows against the will of their fathers, and were ready to suffer persecution from their parents. He mentions especially a beautiful woman of noble birth whom he baptized. A few days after the ceremony she came to him and intimated that she had received a direct warning from God that she should become a “virgin of Christ.” It is not suggested that the opposition of the parents was due to heathen obduracy; it would rather appear that, in the cases which are here contemplated, the parents themselves had likewise embraced Christianity. But they had a natural repugnance to seeing their children withdrawn from the claims of the family and the world. The triumph on which Patrick in this passage complacently dwells is not the triumph of Christian doctrine but of the monastic ideal. Patrick refers to perils through which he passed in the prosecution of his work. He says that divine aid “delivered me often from bondage and from twelve dangers by which my life was endangered.”[175] He mentions one occasion on which he and his companions were seized, and his captors wished to slay him. His belongings were taken from him and he was kept in fetters for a fortnight, but then, through the intervention of influential friends, he was set free and his property restored.[176] [Sidenote: FEATURES OF HIS POLICY]